Dirty Plotte
Dirty Plotte is a comic book series by Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet, published by Drawn & Quarterly from 1991 to 1998. Known for its autobiographical, surreal, and transgressive storytelling, the series explored female experience, identity, and embodiment while influencing a generation of alternative and women cartoonists.
Publication history
Original minicomics
Dirty Plotte began as a self-published photocopied zine used to record Doucet's "day to day life, her dreams, angsts, fantasies." Her first effort, By the Way, was a one-shot zine distributed for free, followed by the first volume of Dirty Plotte, which ran for 12 issues.The title Dirty Plotte combines the Québécois slang plotte, meaning a woman’s vagina, with the English word "dirty," signaling both the comic's focus on female experience and its provocative, transgressive engagement with sexuality and bodily subjectivity, while also evoking the English word "plot" to highlight its narrative dimension.
Early issues had small print runs of roughly 150–200 copies; they ranged from eight to twelve pages and were sold for 25–50 cents. Doucet produced the comics while working part-time at a copy shop in Montreal, which gave her access to a photocopier, and she initially released issues on a nearly monthly schedule. The early comics were bilingual, containing stories in both French and English, and required readers to navigate her slightly fractured English translations from Quebecois French.
One of the most notable stories from the original minicomics was the four-page "E: Ni Manique!", later translated into English as “Heavy Flow.” The story features Doucet as a gargantuan, enraged version of herself rampaging through the city after running out of tampons. Its publication in the Fall 1989 issue of Weirdo, edited by Aline Kominsky-Crumb, introduced Doucet to a wider North American audience and helped establish her reputation outside Quebec.
The minicomics remain rare and highly collectible, with some issues selling for hundreds of dollars due to limited print runs.
Drawn & Quarterly full-size title
Drawn & Quarterly began publishing Doucet in January 1991 in a regular sized comic series also named Dirty Plotte. It was the first ongoing solo title published by Drawn & Quarterly, helping to establish the publisher’s reputation for innovative, creator-driven comics and making it a central force in the early alternative comics scene.Drawn & Quarterly published four issues of Dirty Plotte in 1991, but afterwards new issues were published once per year. Doucet played with the title of the series near the end, with individual issues called such things as Purty Plotte and Purity Plotte.
Many of the autobiographical stories from Dirty Plotte were collected in the trade paperback My New York Diary, which won the 2000 Firecracker Award for best graphic novel.
Content
Dirty Plotte comprised a wide range of short and long comics — some autobiographical, some fictional, and many surreal. Stories took the form of wordless strips, extended narratives, slice-of-life episodes, and dreamlike vignettes, often starring a version of Doucet herself. No subjects were off-limits: menstruation, sexuality, violence, bodily transformation, and grotesque fantasy, frequently pushing well past the point where a gag comic might conventionally end.Much of the series was rooted in personal material. Early issues draw directly from Doucet's daily life and dreams, including recurring scenes of domestic interiors, relationships, anxieties, and artistic frustrations. Stories such as "Levitation" and other dream-comics feature a fluid, unstable Julie figure who splits, morphs, or interacts with doubles of herself. Several strips explore dream-logic transformations of sex and gender — characters change bodies, swap or reshape genitals, or move between male and female embodiments.
At the same time, Dirty Plotte featured pointed parodies and satirical responses to sexist tropes in comics and popular culture. Some episodes invert voyeurism and objectification, staging violent or grotesque reversals in which male readers or protagonists become the targets. Other stories took aim at the conventions of male fantasy comics by exaggerating their sexualized imagery or reassigning their dynamics to a female point of view.
As the series progressed, Doucet incorporated longer and more linear narratives, culminating in the extended serial My New York Diary, which occupied most of the final issues. Unlike the more fragmented, dream-driven pieces that dominated the series, My New York Diary is a straightforward autobiographical account of Doucet's year living in New York City, detailing her romantic relationship, health problems, and struggles with the city.
Themes
Dirty Plotte explores a range of themes related to autobiography, gender, and the everyday experience of artistic labor. Scholars note that the series often centers on the "intimate minutiae" of Doucet's life — dreams, daily routines, intrusive thoughts, and anxieties — rendered with an unfiltered honesty that distinguishes her work within alternative comics. The comic frequently blurs reality and fantasy, using surreal intrusions, talking objects, and dream logic as extensions of Doucet’s interior states. These strategies allow Doucet to depict the pressures of creativity, the volatility of emotion, and the instability of identity in a form that reflects how those experiences actually feel rather than how they conventionally appear in narrative.A major thematic focus is gender. Writer Nicole Rudick observes that Dirty Plotte provides "a kind of negative model of femininity," offering portraits of female characters who are angry, ambivalent, isolated, or openly resistant to prescriptive norms. The series depicts the challenges of being a woman in male-dominated creative scenes, the contradictions of social expectations, and experiences of everyday sexism — often presented through humor, self-deprecation, or exaggerated scenarios. Media activist Anne Elizabeth Moore describes the comic as capturing "the isolation of being a driven female creative," and the tension between external pressures to be nurturing and the artist's own sense of self. Although Doucet does not frame her work as explicitly feminist, readers and critics have interpreted Dirty Plotte as a feminist text grounded less in activist rhetoric than in raw, embodied experience.
Dirty Plotte also addresses interpersonal relationships, romantic jealousy, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. These subjects often appear in compressed, fragmentary episodes that mirror the emotional turbulence Doucet associates with her twenties and early thirties. At times the comic adopts a diaristic form; at other moments it veers into satire or horror, reflecting the instability of mood and memory central to Doucet’s storytelling. Across these shifting modes, Dirty Plotte presents a sustained exploration of creativity, anxiety, desire, and the contradictions of womanhood at the end of the twentieth century.
In addition to critical analysis, Anne Elizabeth Moore described Dirty Plotte as addressing “the isolation of being a driven female creative; the jealousy in personal relationships... the ever-present push from the outside to be maternal and nurturing, but the absolute interior knowledge that that is not your way; and the incredibly shifting sense of gender that a strong, smart woman must feel in order to move about in the world."